Hi guys,
I’m fairly new to dynamic components but I’ve made a simple cabinet where the side panels go down to the floor and the plinth is cut inbetween. No problems here.
I’d like to make another one where the side panels are notched to allow the toe kick to be the full width of the cabinet, as shown in the attached picture. Problem is if I change the ‘Plinth setback’ the plinth part will move but the cutout will stay where it is currently drawn. Is there any way to link them?
You want to change the depth of the notch in the side panel? You would need to separate the side panel into a component for the plinth and one for the rest of the side. Then you can change LenY for the lower part without affecting LenY for the rest of the panel. You could also change LenZ for both parts to adjust the height of the toe kick if you wanted.
You would end up with something like this.
Note that hiding the edges and faces where the two components meet will make them appear as one piece.
Thanks Dave,
Long term idea is to be able to layout the parts and export them for CNC so I wonder if having two parts will cause any issues with that but I’ll give it a try.
I wondered about how you would use the model. Export for CNC might be a problem if the component is two pieces. The hidden edges might also present a problem although hiding them would only be cosmetic for display in the model. I’m not a fan of this sort of thing because in a cutlist the two pieces would be reported instead of the one piece side.
Right on both fronts. I’ve been playing with a extension called abf solutions which can nest and export parts from sketchup but it does see the side panels as two parts and cutlists them separately too.
Interestingly Cabinetsense have a video on youtube where it seems to make this kind of cabinet side but I assume there exports can somehow group them together.
Your method definitely works well if it is for a visual model though.
How many different toe kick depths would you have? Is this the sort of thing where there are just two or three options or is it supposed to be infinitely variable?
In reality two or three would cover most situations but having infinite options would have been ideal.
I will say Dave I’m playing with sketchup at the moment due to the lockdown here. We use another cad for daily work so don’t worry about this too much 
Saying that I’ve always believed sketchup would make the perfect woodwork / millwork application with the right developments. I’m sure it could hang with the big cabinet programs.
I’m generally dealing with woodworking projects that are designed more for hand work or low volume machine production and certainly for that SketchUp is excellent.
I was thinking about a dining table component I did for Thos. Moser a number of years ago. The table comes in three standard sizes although I think they will do custom lengths if needed. Anyway, because their shapes, the long pats couldn’t be scaled and I didn’t want to divide them into smaller sections I made the component so there were three different top components and three different sets of long stretchers. Then displayed one of the tops and one set of long stretchers depending on the selected length. The legs at one end just moved to accommodate the change in length.
Maybe you could do something similar. I don’t know if the software for the CNC would see the invisible components or not but maybe it would work.
Sounds interesting, I’ll need to take a look into hiding/showing components within a dynamic component as I haven’t done that yet.
You could try unifying the parts before sending to other processes, too. They need to be solid, though. If you keep the wrapper, it will keep all the data of the attributes in the toplevel.
If you want to change, reload the component and do a redraw.
I agree with Mike (Jack) on this, I would make the side out of three solids with the adjacent faces and vertices hidden; then, when required use outershell to make it manifold.
I have place a reference code on the second extra level of these components so that a script would read this and automate the outershell or any other method of simplification to leave a component that retains its option dialog howbeit frozen to display only. Then if the DC is required to function again its just a matter of swapping it with its own definition of another. The second level assures any size attributes are updated and custom data is maintained if in common.
A lot of DCs are large and complicated, for example the Trustile doors series in the warehouse. A script can easy strip them down by just deleting all the hidden options and freezing the options. From 1.2Mg to 350 (almost a quarter), plus a few amendments makes the range completely swap-able.
Thanks for the help everyone,
Outershell works perfectly for combining the parts together,
I wonder if anyone could help with a problem I’ve developed in my cabinet. I’ve uploaded my current model which uses two parts for the sides panels (I will be updating this to three parts as pcmoor suggests). Since I changed the sides I’m getting some strange behaviour when I edit the height and depth. Sometimes when I change one it changes the other (to a seemingly random number). I must have something wrong but can’t figure it out.
DYNAMIC CABINET - NOTCH.skp (288.3 KB)
When using groups, they have to be in sync, the quick fix is to make the sides components.
(easier to just use one level of groups at lowest nesting)
I recommend using groups as the sub parts (the parts to the sides) to any complex shape, thus when outer shelled or exploded or whatever operation required, then there is no residue to purge from the file. Whereas objects (sides, shelves… ) should be components.
DYNAMIC CABINET - NOTCH.skp (299.4 KB)
fixed the lenx references for sides as well.
I would like to show you a better way of creating the DCs,
this will give a hint
I will continue tomorrow after work
